FRANçOIS MORELLET (1926–2016)
French artist François Morellet, whose sculptural, perceptual investigations into the properties of light—a deft marriage of sensuousness with the cerebral—has died, reports Hannah McGivern of the Art Newspaper.
Born in 1926 in Cholet, France, where he also lived until the end of his life, Morellet taught himself to paint as a teenager. After a brief fling with figuration, he started making abstractions in 1950, and had his first solo show that same year at Galerie Creuze in Paris. He cofounded the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, GRAV for short, in 1960 with Horacio Garcia Rossi, Francisco Sobrino, and Yvaral, among others—makers dedicated to breaking apart the romance surrounding the “individual” genius of the artist. They made “authorless”-looking works that seemed to combine the aesthetic and philosophical lessons of Minimalism, kineticism, and Op.
Morellet is now considered one of the most important artists of his generation. But at the beginning of his career, his industrially-produced neon works were considered aggressive, garish. As he told Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine Gallery’s artistic director, in a recent interview: “In 1963 my neon works were provocative, vulgar and unsaleable—I had to wait twenty years to sell my first one. Today they are stylish, expensive and very trendy.”
Morellet has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and beyond. Some of those are “François Morellet: du Pompidou Mobile au MuMa,” Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre; “Henri Chotteau legacy: François Morellet,” SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre; and “François Morellet, L’esprit d’escalier,” Musée du Louvre, Paris. His work is also in the permanent collections of many institutions, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; the Tate Modern in London; and New York’s MoMA.
